“Khan of Mankop,” A Rival of “Pan Olgerd”: On the Time when the Toponym Mangup Appeared

This article discusses the chronology of the appearance of the toponym Mangup and its variants in written sources. Mangup (Mankop, Mankup) is the name of the town of Theodoro in Turkish, Russian and Moldavian sources from the 1470s on. By all appearance, this late Tatar name came through the Crimean Khanate to the Moscow State and Moldavia. The given research analyses the accounts on the khan (prince) of “Mankop” who was defeated, with two other khans, on the Don by the Lithuanians ca 1396. The scholarship usually unites this event with the account of the battle of the Grand Duke Olgerd of Lithuania with three Tatar “princes” at Sinie Vody in 1362, sometimes associating the khan of “Mankop” with the prince bearing the Christian name Dmitrii. The analysis undertaken shows that the account on the Lithuanian army sent by Vytautas victory on the Don over three Tatar khans originates from the sixteenth-century Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski. In earlier chronicles and historical works there is only a contamination of the victories over the Tatars of Olgerd and his nephew Vytautas. It is obvious that Maciej Stryjkowski twice described the same Lithuanian-Tatar battle, on the Sinie Vody of Olgerd with three princes called Kutlubach soltan, Kaczybejkierej, and Dimejter soltan, and on the Don of “Olgerd, a lord of Lithuania,” sent by Vytautas, with three “brother-princes, of Krym, Kirkiel, and Mankop.” The titles of the princes are possibly invented by Maciej Stryjkowski, who, trying to give a learned interpretation to his phantom duplicate of Olgerd’s victory, correlated the possessions of the three defeated Tatar leaders with three urban centers in Crimea known to him: Krym (Solkhat), Kyrk-Er (Chufut-Kale) and Mangup. In this way the complex of texts about the fourteenth-century Lithuanian-Tatar battles should be excluded from the number of sources directly related to the history of Mangup.